If we sunk ourselves with a borrow-and-spend mentality, how is doing more of that going to bring us to our brave new world?

As poor as some of them are (by contrast), the Chinese save 25 times more than we do. If our government says, "Get out there and spend, spend, spend..." didn't that contribute to the hole we dug ourselves into in the first place? Americans already owe more than they make. Why, if that didn't work, do we want to bring it back?

If our government is our exemplar, and their overriding policy is to borrow more in order to spend more, and by default perhaps encourage us to do that, is that the way out?

A democracy requires fiscally-responsible citizens. Maybe big government comes about as the answer to the problem that there are no longer enough of those kinds of voters to make small government possible. The more voters there are who can't - or won't - be responsible for themselves, the more government agencies are required to do that for them. Is that what the founding fathers had in mind?

And where did our present economists go to school - if what they learned was that a consumption and service economy is more viable in this globalization world than inventing and exporting something of tangible value to the rest of the world? The answer is not "jobs". It is competence, and it is relevance. Those are not our present government's criteria.

"We're going to balance the budget" is just "woo" talk - somewhat akin to "I will lover you forever," or "Our toothpaste is better than anyone else's." Are we citizens really that dumb? Or are we voting our own personal interests - nothing beyond that? One hears very little these days about self-responsibility. Has democracy come to mean the right to buy whatever you want?